1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved data processing system and, in particular, to a method and system for multiple computer or process coordinating. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method and system for network management.
2. Description of Related Art
Technology expenditures have become a significant portion of operating costs for most enterprises, and businesses are constantly seeking ways to reduce information technology (IT) costs. This has given rise to an increasing number of outsourcing service providers, each promising, often contractually, to deliver reliable service while offloading the costly burdens of staffing, procuring, and maintaining an IT organization. While most service providers started as network pipe providers, they are moving into server outsourcing, application hosting, and desktop management. For those enterprises that do not outsource, they are demanding more accountability from their IT organizations as well as demanding that IT is integrated into their business goals. In both cases, “service level agreements” have been employed to contractually guarantee service delivery between an IT organization and its customers. As a result, IT teams now require management solutions that focus on and support “business processes” and “service delivery” rather than just disk space monitoring and network pings.
Distributed data processing systems with thousands of nodes are known in the prior art. The nodes can be geographically dispersed, and the overall computing environment can be managed in a distributed manner. The managed environment can be logically separated into a series of loosely connected managed regions, each with its management server for managing local resources. The management servers can coordinate activities across the enterprise and can permit remote site management and operation. Local resources within one region can be exported for the use of other regions.
However, currently network status gathering relies on discovery commands such as a “ping” or a SNMP. Such a procedure is inefficient on systems where the “ping” is invalid or in networks where most systems are SNMP compliant (where no “ping” is necessary). At present there is no mechanism for allowing administrators to choose a method for determining how to gather a status of the network. At present, administrators cannot choose to perform SNMP commands first, “ping” commands first, SNMP commands only, or allow for dynamic solutions to be generated. Furthermore, dynamic solutions cannot be created by keeping track of how many machines are SNMP compliant and how many “ping” commands fail, being able to reverse the order of gathering the status of the network, or excluding one command or the other.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a method and system that dynamically gathers status of a network based on specified status gathering parameters so as to eliminate impact on system performance that is caused by invalid or unnecessary network monitoring operations.